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You’re watching a movie, and the music in
it sounds familiar. You’ve never heard it before, but you know the style.
It's unmistakably American -- the sound of small towns and the wide prairie,
a sound simple yet grand, evoking both the front porch of a simple home
and the great expanse of our plains and mountains. It’s a peaceful sound,
and above all, true to the great traditions of America: open, spacious,
and free, promising both contentment now and endless possibilities
in the future.
 Music like this
is so comfortable and so right for what it wants to express that most of
us always respond to it. But what we might not know is that this sound,
this inescapable part of the American musical and cinematic landscape, was
created by a man who wasn't really a film composer. Instead, he was (and
is) America’s greatest figure in classical music: Aaron Copland, whose
birth centennial (November 14) we’re celebrating this year with
performances of his works all over the country.
Copland did
score a few movies, such as Our Town and Of Mice and Men. But
he actually created his familiar, emphatically American sound in his classical
works, including such standards as Fanfare for the Common Man and
Appalachian Spring. If you’ve ever heard these -- and no doubt
you have -- you know they don’t have any of the European pomp we often
associate with classical music. They’re simple, direct, and completely
our own.
Think of the famous Fanfare. Nothing could be more accessible or
more relaxed. What we hear is the full brass section of a symphony
orchestra, plus the quick deep throb of the kettledrums. This is grand
without being overbearing; imagine a strong, safe hand guiding your eye
across an American panorama of cities, farms, the Appalachian Trail, the
Rocky Mountains, and above all, our people, seen at their best and
noblest.
Or think of Appalachian
Spring, the score for a ballet choreographed in 1944 by one of the
first great American choreographers, Martha Graham. Its beginning is as
simple as the Fanfare’s is grand: just a few notes for the softer
colors of the orchestra, irresistibly suggesting the calm of an early
spring morning, the air bright and clear, barely a breeze, everything at
peace, gathering strength for the day to come. Suddenly there’s a burst
of eager activity, and we’re off on a dance through the American
countryside, with shadows mingling with the light and a simple Shaker folk
tune at the end.
Music like this
is easy to love, and in writing it, Copland took a stand opposite to that
of his classical colleagues. At a time when so-called serious music was
dissonant and difficult, Copland made it evocative and understandable,
something everyone could listen to. Copland’s view, as we’ll see, didn’t
necessarily prevail, even in his own work. But it’s not hard to
understand why he’s so beloved. For one long moment, he put the best of
America into a musical genre that was ready to express our lives.
Who was this man who helped define the sound of America? To begin with,
he was the exception to all sorts of unwritten rules, starting (obviously)
with the one that said classical music couldn’t relate to everyday
American life. Having broken that rule, he also broke the related one that
said classical composers in the United States had to be more European than
American. Finally, as a gay, left-wing, French-educated Jew from Brooklyn,
he also demolished any assumptions that only mainstream folks from the
heartland could express the deepest spirit of America.
But then, when
Copland first set out to compose in the early 1900s, he also broke the
rule that said Americans shouldn’t write serious music at all. In 1921
Copland, the son of a storekeeper, decided to study composition in France
because, as he later said, "it was known that any well-educated
American had to have the European experience." He ended up at a small
school in Fontainebleau for American musicians.
(There Copland
quickly found out that even then Americans were able to top the Europeans
in at least one area. He had rented a French piano, and in a letter home
he complained, "My piano is an awful tin can. There are no pianos in
France to compare with the Steinway. America is ahead in that,
anyway.")
In
Fontainebleau the young man had the kind of rare good luck that determines
the course of a lifetime: He met the great teacher Nadia Boulanger. He
chose to study with her, in part, because he liked "modern
music," and Boulanger was a modernist, friendly with Igor Stravinsky
and every other progressive composer who lived or worked in France.
But Boulanger never tried to make
her students fit any mold. Years later, she would tell her Japanese
pupils, "Remain Japanese. Feel at home in Europe, but do not lose
your quality." We can imagine her saying exactly that to Copland
about being American.
It was in Europe that Copland learned to give his music an American
flavor. During a visit to Vienna in 1923, he later recalled, "I
listened to jazz in the bars, and hearing it in a fresh context heightened
my interest in its potential. I began to consider that jazz rhythms might
be the way to make an American-sounding music."
But back in New
York, Copland felt he needed to wave the modern-music flag, especially
because he wanted to create a musical community in which American
composers could feel equal to Europeans. So he wrote modernist scores with
abstract titles such as Short Symphony and Symphonic Ode. These
weren’t knotty, though, but spare and transparent, and his ability to
compose such music helped Copland when, in the mid-1930s, he turned again
to American themes, writing the works that were to establish his lasting
popularity.
"During
these years," he said, "I began to feel an increasing
dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the
living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of
working in a vacuum."
Yet
there was more going on than just a composer’s unhappiness. The
depression was raging, people were out of work and suffering, unions were
organizing, and artists in all fields turned toward depicting what was
going on.
Copland
fell in with left-wing causes; in 1934 he even wrote a song called
"Into the Streets May First" for the annual socialist
celebration of May Day. And while he was never doctrinaire, he began to
honor American folk culture with pieces such as Rodeo, Billy the Kid, and,
of course, Appalachian Spring.
During the McCarthy era he briefly got into trouble,
although he’d never belonged to any organized party, Communist or otherwise.
At the same time, he started to abandon his accessible style. Contemporary
classical music had moved, despite his influence, in a more academic
direction, and Copland himself got caught up in the trend, writing dissonant,
atonal music.
His
work from this period is both Coplandesque -- he was always true to
himself, even then-- and surprising, because the music’s sound is more
troubled and anxious. He kept his old style going, too, and at
one point was asked to write a piano piece called "Down a Country
Lane" for Life magazine, then the most popular weekly in the
United States. The work was published in Life in June 1962, giving
Copland more visibility than perhaps any other classical composer has ever
had in America (at least until John Corigliano accepted his Academy Award
on television recently for his score for The Red Violin).
By the end of his life, Copland had received every conceivable honor,
including medals conferred by presidents Johnson and Reagan, and his music
was played at Richard Nixon’s second inauguration. Another honor, of a
very different sort, came in 1998 from Spike Lee. The filmmaker found
Copland’s music so all-encompassing that he used it in his movie He
Got Game, both to underscore a collage of basketball being played all
over America and to evoke the lives of African Americans living in the
projects of Brooklyn’s Coney Island neighborhood.
Copland may
never have visited the projects (though he lived till 1990, long enough to
have seen them), and he never tried to describe them in music. Yet Spike
Lee responded to something universal in his work.
I talked
to Lee when he was making He Got Game, because I was writing
the liner notes to the sound track CD from the film, and his love for
Copland touched me very deeply. He told me he didn’t know classical
music and didn’t usually respond to it. But when, almost by accident,
he heard a Copland piece, he immediately recognized its meaning and
vowed to use it in his movie.
He Got Game is not the only instance in which Copland’s work
evoked even more than the composer himself had imagined. It’s fascinating
to note that Appalachian Spring was never intended to be a portrait
of anything. Of course, Copland knew he had included a Shaker folk melody,
and in other pieces -- such as Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and El
Salon Mexico -- set out from the start to write about cowboys or
other folk themes.
Appalachian
Spring, though, was an exception. His own title for the piece had
been, simply, Ballet for Martha. But when Martha Graham heard the
score, it suggested an Appalachian spring to her, just as it has to
listeners ever since. Copland was American to the core, even when he was
trying to be abstract.
"I have
been amused," he once said, "that people so often have come up
to me to say, ‘When I listen to that ballet of yours, I can just feel
spring and see the Appalachians,’ But when I wrote the music,
I had no idea what Martha was going to call it! Even after people learn
that I didn’t know the ballet title when I wrote the music, they still
tell me they see the Appalachians and feel spring.
"Well, I’m
willing if they are!"
Diversion, September 2000
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